Observations about and lessons learned from living life with Labrador retrievers

Monday, February 09, 2009

Technical Note -- Comment Moderation

Last evening some spammer snuck a lengthy, rambling, in-your-face comment into yesterday's post. BFF called to tell me it was there, and I'm so glad she did -- I found the comment offensive and completely irrelevant to LabTails.

Because I didn't have my comment moderation feature turned on, I had to pull the entire post (so sorry, Kayceebeecee, that I lost your comment doing so), and then I just re-posted it anew.

All that is to say two things:

1. I'm so sorry if anyone viewed the comment and found it offensive. Please know that that comment in no way reflects what I feel or believe.

2. I've enabled comment moderation again. Just this morning I received another questionable comment (it sounded suspiciously inappropriate and was from someone I'd never heard of), so I rejected it, and didn't allow it to be posted.

I really don't like using comment moderation -- I want you all to feel free to comment honestly about anything anytime (even if we disagree). But the spammers and porn folks out there are making it difficult enough that people like me have to resort to moderating what's posted on our sites to prevent offensive material from creeping in.

I do hope comment moderation won't keep you all from commenting. All moderation means is that I read the comments first and approve them before they show up publicly. The process of commenting remains the same; it's just that the comments go through me now first instead of going directly to the blog.

Again, I'm so sorry about yesterday's spam comment. And I hope you'll understand about the moderation thing.

7 comments:

I think it is really sad that people have nothing better to do than post garbage on innocent blogs. It makes more work for you, because now you have to moderate the comments, but we appreciate the effort. A posted comment is for YOU, anyway, so if mine does not show up right away, I am quite okay with that. I have other things to do! Imagine that ...

PS: You can also turn off Anonymous comments, so people at least have to tell you who they are when they comment.

Yes, I saw that lengthy comment and did not know how to tell you about it but I posted my comment anyway so I totally understand you removing and reposting the whole post. My first thought was...."What's up with this?" I did not read the whole thing because it was incredably long. I was almost afraid to post anything tho thinking somehow it would get associated with me or linked onto me somehow.

ugh, I'm sorry that's happening. I don't think anyone will mind that you're moderating. Like Leslie said, it doesn't matter if a comment doesn't show up right away.

ps you should be able to delete just the one objectionable comment without deleting the whole entry and other comments. It will just say something like "comment removed by blog owner," or if you choose "delete permanently" I *believe* it removes all record although I haven't tried that one.

Comment moderation doesn't bother me. I have been using it for a long time to get rid of the spam too, as well as to avoid using the "word verification" thing that is VERY difficult for me to read/use, even with the audio option.

However, if you don't want to use comment moderation, (like Erin said) you should be able to remove a single offensive comment without removing an entire post - just click on the little trashcan icon you should see next to each comment published on your blog. There is also a checkbox option to "remove this comment forever" that will get rid of the "comment removed by blog owner" note that is otherwise left behind.